WAR HEROES, astronauts, explorers, and pioneers may come
and go, but the keepers of the American cultural-canonical pantheon
will, it seems, never evict Babe Ruth. The legendary baseball
player has been the subject of hundreds of books and movies (most
recently The Babe, starring John Goodman in a startling
likeness of the lumpy, hard-living player) and will doubtless
fill many more recitations of his great achievements--many of
them, like the reputed game-saving homerun that Ruth dedicated
to a sick boy, apocryphal.

Ruth himself suffered a troubled boyhood and an adulthood filled
with violence, alcoholism, and excess. We learn little of these
matters in Babe Ruth's Own Book of Baseball, ghosted by
sportswriter Ford Frick and originally published in 1928, at the
height of Ruth's fame. Instead, Ruth's pages are filled with homespun
homilies straight from the Dale Carnegie and Horatio Alger school
of positive thinking, on the art of the game. Much of Ruth's advice
remains useful for today's would-be stars of the diamond:

Pitchers--real pitchers--learn early that their job isn't
so much to keep opposing batsmen from hitting so much as it is
to make them hit at someone. The trouble with most kid pitchers
is that they forget there are eight other men on the team to help
them. They just blunder ahead, putting everything they have on
every pitch, and trying to carry the weight of the whole game
on their shoulders. The result is that they tire out and go bad
along in the middle of the game, and then the wise old heads have
to go out and rescue them.

Youngsters of his time were enthralled by Ruth's old-fashioned
wisdom on how to hit the ball, catch the ball, throw the ball;
and some of the current crop of well-paid players might learn
a thing or to from the modesty that is so evident in his reminiscences,
whether genuine or the invention of a hired pen. Whatever the
case, because Ruth ranks among the finest players the country
has ever produced and knew his game intimately, this book belongs
on the shelf of every baseball fan.

Folklore has it that the game Ruth mastered was born Athena-like
from Abner Doubleday's thoughtful brow in 1839. Doubleday did
many things; he won Civil War battles and built the first cable-car
line in San Francisco. But, Albert Spalding notes in America's
National Game, first published in 1911, baseball is an adaptation
of a New England game called town ball, itself an adaptation of
the English game cricket, which is impossible for anyone but the
English and their recent colonials to understand. Having thus
acknowledged our debt to England, Spalding--who founded the sports-equipment
company that still bears his name--takes pains to distinguish
our national virtues from those of the mother country:

(The English) play Cricket because it accords with the traditions
of their country to do so; because it is easy and does not overtax
their energy or their thought..... Base Ball owes its prestige
as our National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport
it is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, and Combativeness;
American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness,
Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistence, Performance; American
Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility.

Spalding's pages are marked by such saber-rattling, which arrives
in such volume as to shake down a fortress, of the kind of thinking
that brought Jimmy the Greek so much trouble late in life. Still,
he doesn't shy away from writing at length about the game's dark
side in his time, notably a string of scandals in the late 19th
century that make the infamous Chicago Black Sox fiasco of 1919
(see John Sayles' movie Eight Men Out) seem modest by comparison.
Spalding's impartiality in writing about these troubling matters
is an added virtue of his encyclopedic book. Chest-puffing Americanism
aside, America's National Game is full of noteworthy asides
and a keen sense of historical detail, and makes for fine reading.
In fact, it offers better entertainment than much of what passes
for baseball today.